Kootenay became the dominant black bear male in the valley. That meant we didn’t have young black bear males coming into town, he just booted them out so they didn’t cause trouble in town. We worked together with Glen Peers, Donny Mickle and Steve Logan and Bruno Tessier, he was a volunteer for us for a long time and Karen Kane, and they would do a lot of the bear watching out in the woods and come back with pictures and stories. And it was the liver fluke time too because I remember, Bruno would be in the lab and John Woods was doing his PHD on elk. So there was a lot happening. Going off in different directions all the time. Then we started the wolf study. A lot happening.
MH: Can you tell me about any rescue/wildlife stories that stick out in your memory? 5011:
RK: For rescue stories, probably the one that sticks to my brain the best was the time we were on Yamnuska, Grilmair Chimney and two people got off route. Peter Fuhrmann drove like a madman when he was going to a rescue so nobody wanted to go with him. It was more dangerous getting to the rescue than it was doing the rescue.
Grillmair Cable Rescue
Gonda Cable Practice
We set up a cable rescue and we used the helicopter to tie off to. We were having a hard time finding really good anchor points so we tied off to the helicopter. I got to go down on the cable. I thought it was really cool that I got to do that. I had complete trust in the team above me, as we had practiced the cable rescue technique many times with Fuhrmann. It was an uneventful lower, harness one victim, get pulled back up, go down again, harness the other one and again get pulled back up. In the photo I am the little red helmet dot at the top and the victims are huddled together at the bottom. Sid Marty was writing his book about the 100 years of Parks so they were taking pictures. As we were setting up Sid looked over at Bruce McKinnon and said; ”McKinnon, get out of the picture, your big smile is ruining the exposure”!
We did a lot of silly things too. Lance Cooper and I became best friends in the Warden Service and we’d be fooling around a lot after work. We built a little replica helicopter sling model for Jim Davies so we would all get a chance to fly, not just hang under it. We’d invent stuff and built our own river rescue sling contraption with Stan Peyto in the garage. I remember one time some kids got stuck in a frost pocket, the hole in the wall on Mt. Cory. This guy had a broken arm, and when Lance and I flew in it was almost dark. At that time, we had just done our EMT course so the ambulance boys brought the ambulance up to the bottom of the route. The guy was in bad shape, in a lot of pain, but we could sling right to him. We quickly secured him into the Jenny bag and were ready to sling back out. Cooper and I were flipping a coin to see who was going to go down with the guy and who was going to stay and do clean-up. Lance drew the short straw so he had to sling down to the ambulance and take the guy to town. It was getting quite dark but Jim Davies flew in with the search light on, and picked me up on the long line. I flew all the way back to Banff under the helicopter. Just having the time of my life being Peter Pan.
Another one that really stuck in my head for a long time after was when I was stationed at Lake Louise and there was an avalanche in Stanley Glacier valley. A group had been cross country skiing and some were caught in an avalanche. The survivors came out to report it but it was late in the day and too dark to mobilize a rescue party. By the time we got in the adjacent slope had avalanched as well, burying the victims even deeper. We were there for days with probe lines, those big old long probes that would wave in the wind. I think Larry Gilmar had finally hit the body and it was 12 feet down in the snow. We had to dig a big progression of steps down to the body. Needless to say we were too late for a live recovery.
All that training with Fuhrmann paid off. When I got caught in the tsunami in Sri Lanka, our little place where we were staying was destroyed along with much of the coastline. Total wreckage and confusion! There was the fellow from the British Army staying at our bungalow as well. When the water settled out, and everyone was running around in total chaos, this army guy and I got together and we said, “Okay, everybody cool, it. Just stop! You’re not going anywhere unless you have shoes on.” And everybody went, huh? “Yes, there’s broken glass everywhere. You don’t do anything until you have protection! We don’t want to be rescuing you so find some shoes. Then we’ll get organized and then we’ll go and find water.” This was rescue training from Peter Fuhrmann and rescue schools. It was embedded in the back of my head and popped up. How to protect everybody that is involved and to get organized, before people ran off aimlessly. It paid off, all that training in other aspects of life.
5650: The neat thing which just flashed in my head the other day, when I first started coming to Banff, the bears were fat and glossy and they were eating in the dumps. Years later we started to close the dumps. In the subsequent years, their weights dropped and they were shabbier looking, they didn’t have that glossy coat around from all that free food and extra nourishment. In the spring when the bears came out of their dens, they would still lose weight until into July and then they’d have to pack it on. I saw that transition from the bears in the dump to that whole thing of bear proof bins. I was in Lake Louise at the time when they were trying to develop the bear proof bins and some big grizzlies got in there and they just would trash these bins and just bend the steel because they didn’t want their food source taken away, and they were used to hitting the dump at the Chateau Lake Louise. Rick Langshaw spent a lot of time with bears too and he did the first big prosecution charging the Chateau Lake Louise with leaving food available to the bears. That became a really political issue because you don’t charge the CPR. So he got in a whole bunch of trouble and Sid Marty got upset and everybody else. We didn’t understand the politics of it all at that time.
Rick and Monte Rose Whiskey Creek 1980
Kathy Rettie 1979
Overall we did pretty well trying to let nature take its course. Elk died in frozen rivers, or severe winters, and we let it happen. There were over 800 elk in the Bow Valley at one time and we didn’t have any wolves. Once the wolves returned, the population dynamics shifted. I remember the first white tailed deer in Banff was sighted in 1973 at Carrot Creek. Prior to that there were only mule deer. Now, it’s possibly half and half, whitetail and mule deer. They are all over the place. The artificially inflated bear populations of the open dump days have settled into a more natural population. Reno Summerhold (Oct 2021) just wrote a great letter to the newspaper about why are they relocating all these black bears out of Canmore? Just intercept feed them. We did that with the bears with the roadkill that happened along the highway before it was fenced. We kept the bears out of town in the spring when they were hard up for food. We would get Jim Davies to come and fly the carcasses out in the bush and the grizzlies wouldn’t come to town because they could go up there and feed. We weren’t so specialized that we got onto these really narrow focus things. We were kind of more generalists. We had 888 elk in the Bow Valley at the peak, before the wolves started to make a good dent in that population. After I resigned they took a bunch of elk and relocated them elsewhere. You can still see them out at the Indian Grounds but not like we used to, or in the fall at the Rec grounds and golf course rutting and bugling. With wildlife you always had surprise events like Waterton had that period for a couple of years when the bighorn sheep licked all the salt from underneath vehicle wheel wells, and it became a serious issue.
MH: How did the Warden Service change over the years? 1:01:30:
RK: Well, I hate to say it but we got Americanized. They took Law Enforcement and they put wardens into the flak vests, handcuffs and sidearms, just like the Americans. One time I was in Yellowstone, I’d done a little hike and couldn’t park in the parking lot because it was too small. I parked in a ditch with my old hippie van. When I came back from the hike and changed my boots I went off into the sagebrush and peed in the sagebrush. And then I looked up as I was walking back to the van, and this big storm trooper comes down and says, “What do you think you’re doing?” I told him there wasn’t any parking in the parking lot when we got here so I parked in the ditch. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You were exposing yourself.” I thought, Holy shit, this guy’s dangerous! But that whole American system where they just had this Law Enforcement branch that they’re not Park Rangers, they’re just Law Enforcement guys. They don’t have a feel for the animals or anything down there, people interacting it’s black and white and that’s that. So that happened here, I think I’m afraid.
